A Winter Haunting

by Dan Simmons

  This is the last thing Duane McBride ever saw.

  The glassed-in driver’s cab, twelve feet above the whirling blades and flying snow, was illuminated by weak interior lights, and Dale stared at the face of the driver, shifting like a poorly done digital effect in a movie—first Bonheur’s, the oldest skinhead’s, leering face, then the Congden corpse face, then Bonheur’s, then Congden’s. The interior light went out. Dale turned and ran.

  Forty-one years earlier, Duane had run deeper into this field and died. Dale swung left, back toward the burning farmhouse and its outbuildings, desperate to put something—anything—between himself and the machine lurching and chewing behind him.

  Halfway to the nearest shed, Dale knew that he was not going to make it to the chicken coop and other outbuildings. And the shouting in the darkness there told him where the other skinheads waited. Running only thirty feet in front of the rusted gatherer points and whirling chains and snapper rolls, Dale cut right and lurched through the drifts toward the fueling station. There was a chance, just a chance, that he could climb the support girders around the two hundred–gallon fuel tank, jump from there to the roof of the old generator shed, and leap down to the safety of the other outbuildings from there.

  Dale leaped for the metal support trusses, slashed his palms on the rusted metal of the girders, pulled himself up with his feet scrabbling against the big cylindrical fuel tank for leverage, and managed to get ten feet above ground level when the giant combine smashed into the tank, ripped the support girders out of the ground, and drove the whole complex into and through the rear of the generator shed. Dale was thrown fifteen feet into the air, and it was only luck and the mysteries of ballistics that brought him down twenty feet north of the combine rather than headfirst into the churning snapper rolls. As it was, the giant machine lurched several yards further, corn pickers boring into and chewing up the rusted fuel tank while spewing gasoline over the combine and everything around it. Just the inertia of the ancient combine smashed the rear wall of the generator shed to kindling while the corn head’s gathering points spewed back splinters and rusted steel within the geyser of gasoline.

  Stunned, the wind knocked completely out of him despite the cushioning effect of the foot of snow he had landed in, Dale lay on his back and watched Bonheur’s face melt into C.J. Congden’s face, both visages leering at him from the high driver’s cab. Dale heard the old transmission grind and the combine backed away from the wreckage, the fuel tank still stuck on the corn picker points like a rust-colored rat in a terrier’s teeth. The combine ground another thirty feet back, shaking and scraping the skewered tank off its snapper rolls, and then turned back in Dale’s direction.

  Dale had crawled a few feet north, away from the huge circle of fuel-reddened snow, but he knew that he did not have the strength to rise and run again. He barely made it to his knees to face the giant machine.

  The combine’s harvesting lights snapped on, pinning Dale in their merciless beams.

  “Not this time,” gasped Dale. He pulled Clare’s gift of the Dunhill lighter from his pocket and flicked it. It lighted at once. Almost wearily, Dale tossed the lighter six feet into the circle of soaked snow.

  The flames leaped ten feet high at once, roaring in a circle around the combine, leaping up the soaked snapper rolls and climbing like blazing ivy to the high grain bin and soaked driver’s cab. The glass there blackened and buckled. Then the fire ignited the remaining fuel in the lacerated storage tank, and the explosion lifted the front of the combine five feet in the air while blowing Dale twenty feet in the opposite direction.

  Dale rolled in the drifts, using his hands to rub snow on his flash-burned eyebrows and hairline.

  For a minute the combine just burned steadily, the flames having not yet reached its own interior fuel tank, melting snow, curling paint, and superheating old steel and iron with a hiss that filled the night.

  Hrot-garmr, Dale thought dully. Funeral flames like a howling dog. The heat from the flames was intense, but almost pleasant after all the wet cold.

  Then, slowly, amazingly, the door to the flaming cab opened and a human figure engulfed in fire stepped out on the burning grain bin deck and jumped out to lie facedown and burning in the snow.

  Dale was vaguely aware of the other skinheads fifty feet or so behind him, silhouettes against the other fire—The Jolly Corner—but none of these forms moved. “Shit,” said Dale and staggered to his feet. He rushed as well as he could to the burning man’s side, dragged him out of the circle of burning fuel, and threw snow on the back of the man’s burning jacket and flesh until the flames were smothered. He rolled the man over. Skinhead Lester Bonheur’s features were burned red down to the muscle layer, and his eyes were flickering as if from an epileptic fit.

  On his knees next to him, Dale sagged backward and shouted to the unmoving skinheads back by the sheds, “For God’s sake, go for an ambulance.” None of them answered or moved.

  The burned shape in front of him seemed to gain mass, rolled over, and got to its knees. “It looks like I have to do this myself,” hissed the corpse of C.J. Congden and lunged at Dale, knocking him onto his back and grabbing him by the throat.

  Dale’s gasping breath was visible in the air as he clawed at Congden’s tightening fingers. No breath came from Congden’s broken, open maw. The thing was terribly strong, its rotted mass heavy on him, and Dale felt what was left of his own strength slipping away with the last of his breath.

  “Fuck you,” Dale gasped up into Congden’s contorted death mask, and then Dale surrendered—not to Congden, not to those fuckers behind him, but to forty years of resistance, letting the wall in his mind crumble like chalk. With the last of his breath, Dale shouted into the night, “Gifr! Geri! Hurkilas! Osiris sews healf hundisces mancynnes, he haefde hundes haefod!”

  Congden’s rotted fingers tightened on Dale’s windpipe, cutting into the flesh of his neck, and the mouth lowered as if ready to suck the last breath from Dale if necessary. Instead, Dale used his last breath, to howl defiance.

  “Anubis! Kesta! Hapi! Tuamutef! Qebhesenuf!”

  Then there was no more breath with which to shout or breathe, and the Congden thing laid its full weight upon Dale, who sensed but could not see the five hounds knocking aside four skinheads, not leaping on them but past them, and then the first and largest of the impossibly huge jackal dogs hit Congden with a noise like a sledgehammer striking a rotten watermelon and ripped Congden’s head off with one swipe of its massive jaws.

  Congden’s arms and fingers continued to choke Dale.

  The hounds were all on Congden now, ripping the animated, headless corpse literally limb from limb and then limb from torso, black dogs running through flames from the burning combine and then circling back as if the flames did not exist, growling, snarling, and fighting each other in their hound-frenzy over the lacerated torso and scattered parts.

  “Jesus fuck,” cried one of the distant skinheads, and Dale dimly heard them running back toward the burning farmhouse and their Chevy Suburban.

  Dale staggered to all fours, shaking the last of Congden off his chest and legs. Blazing-eyed hounds knocked Dale to one side and snatched up the rotted bits—a cowboy-booted foot, a fleshy ribcage trailing intestines, a half-fleshed jawbone—and then ran with them into and through the flames, disappearing into the darkness beyond. Dale rolled onto his side and looked over to where Bonheur still lay in the trampled snow. Smoke rose from the man’s dark form. Dale could not tell if he was breathing.

  Dale tried to get to his feet, aware that the burning combine’s fuel tank could ignite any second, but found that he could no longer stand or even kneel. He rolled on his belly and started crawling back through the mottled snow toward the sheds and blazing farmhouse.

  Flashing red lights and flashing blue lights. A half dozen vehicles, all with lights flashing, in the turnaround near the farmhouse, and more emergency vehicles just visible on the driveway. Dale caught a glimpse of the skinheads
raising their arms, dropping weapons, of a fire truck, of men rushing with hoses and other men running and stumbling through the drifts toward the burning combine and him, and then Dale decided it might be a good idea to rest a minute. Belly down in the snow, he put his burned forehead on his bloody forearm and closed his eyes.

  TWENTY-NINE

  * * *

  ON the third day, I rise again and leave this place—the hospital, the farm, the county, the state.

  But on the first day I almost do not wake at all. Later that evening, the doctor confides in me that they were concerned, that my vital signs showed someone slipping more toward coma than wakefulness or recovery, and that they do not understand, since my injuries had proved essentially superficial and had been dealt with during the night. I could have explained the near-coma state to him, but would probably have found myself in a straitjacket. On that first day and evening in the hospital, Deputy Brian Presser and Deputy Taylor were there, and together they irritated the doctor by insisting on taking a videotaped statement from me, as if I were on the verge of death after all. I told them the truth, mostly, although I said that I could remember nothing after the first explosion of the combine.

  When it is my turn to quiz them, I ask, “Did anyone die?”

  “Only Old Man Larsen,” says Taylor.

  For a second I must look blank, for Deputy Presser says, “Bebe Larsen, the guy they commandeered the Chevy Suburban from on the day before Christmas Eve. Derek and one of the other kids confirmed that the five of them were pretty pissed when they hiked out from the quarry that night. They roughed the old man up a bit before tying him up and sticking him in the back of the truck. He was dead when they got to one of the other kid’s sister’s house in Galesburg.”

  “Heart attack,” says Deputy Taylor. “But the skinheads didn’t know that.”

  “Lester Bonheur?” I ask. My hands are bandaged for burns. My right side and right arm hurt from where they removed bits of buckshot, and I have stitches holding my scalp in place on that side. My eyelashes and eyebrows have been burned away, my hairline has receded three inches because of the flames, and I have goopy salve over much of my face. It all feels wonderful.

  “Bonheur’s still alive,” grunts Deputy Presser, “but he’s burned all to hell and gone. They’re transferring him to the St. Francis burn unit in Peoria tomorrow morning. The docs think he’ll live, but he’s going to have a shitload of skin grafts ahead of him.”

  “Hey, Professor,” says Deputy Taylor, referring to something he had asked earlier during the taped interview, “who was that other guy there at the fire . . . the one the kids say they saw? The one who looked like he was dead?”

  I close my eyes and pretend to sleep.

  On the second day, Sheriff McKown shows up with some magazines for me to read, a Dairy Queen milkshake for me to drink, and the ThinkPad computer. “Found this in the chicken coop,” he said. “I assume it’s yours.”

  I nod.

  “We didn’t turn it on or anything, so I don’t know if it still works,” says McKown, pulling a chair and settling into it rather gracefully. “I presume there’s no evidence on it . . . at least none relating to this weird series of events.”

  “No,” I say truthfully. “Just one bad novel and some personal stuff.” Including a suicide note, but I do not say that.

  McKown does not pursue it. He ascertains that I am healthy enough to answer a few more questions, takes out an audiotape recorder and his notebook, and spends the next hour asking me very precise and logical questions. I answer as truthfully as I can, providing often imprecise and rarely logical answers. Sometimes, though, I have to lie.

  “And those rope burns on your neck,” he asks. “Do you remember how you received those?”

  I automatically touch the torn tissue on my throat. “I don’t remember,” I say.

  “Possibly something when you were crawling through that tunnel,” says McKown, although I know that he knows that this is not the case.

  “Yes.”

  When he is finished and the notebook is put away and the recorder is off, he says, “Dr. Foster tells me that you can leave here tomorrow. I brought a present for you.” He sets a single key on the moveable tray hanging over the bed.

  I lift it. It is darkened with carbon and the plastic base of it has melted slightly, but it looks intact.

  “It still works on your Cruiser,” says Sheriff McKown. “I had Brian drive it over. It’s in the lot outside.”

  “Amazing the key survived the fire and that you found it,” I say.

  McKown shrugs slightly. “Metal’s like bones and some memories . . . it abides.”

  I look at the sheriff through my puffy, swollen eyelids. Not for the first time am I reminded that keen intelligence can be found in unlikely places. I say, “I imagine that I will have to stay around here for quite a while.”

  “Why?” says Sheriff McKown.

  I start to shrug and then choose not to. The bandages are very tight around my right side and ribs, and it already hurts a bit to breathe deeply. “Arraignment?” I say. “More depositions? Investigation? Trial?”

  McKown reaches over to where he has set his Stetson on my bed, lifts it, and unnecessarily re-creases its crown. “One more interview this evening with Deputy Presser,” he says, “and I think we’ve got all the information we need. You won’t be needed for the kids’ arraignment and I doubt if there’ll be a trial . . . about the burning of the farmhouse and their attack on you, I mean.”

  I sit in my hospital bed and wait for more explanation.

  McKown shrugs and taps the brim of his hat against his knee. The crease in his gray-green trouser material is very sharp. “Derek’s and Toby’s and Buzz’s confessions pretty well agree that they came to burn you out and hurt you on New Year’s Eve. And you didn’t use any sort of deadly force . . . all you did is try to run. It’s not your fault that Bonheur was such a moron that he drove Mr. Johnson’s combine into the fuel tank.”

  I nod and say nothing.

  “Besides,” continues the sheriff, “the real crime here is the death of Bebe Larsen. But I don’t think that will come to trial either. Three of the boys are juveniles, they’ll get plea bargains and spend some time at a juvenile center and then waste my time on probation around here. And the other two will cop to lesser charges rather than face murder. If Bonheur lives, and I guess he’s going to, he’ll be going away again for a while. Can I ask you a question, Professor Stewart?”

  I nod again, sure that he is going to ask about the extra figure the skinheads say they saw struggling with me in the light of the fires, even though I’ve stated in all the interviews that it was Bonheur who tried to choke me before collapsing again.

  “The dogs,” he says, surprising me. No one has mentioned the dogs in all the formal interviews during the past twenty-four hours.

  “A lot of people and vehicles stomped that snow down before daylight, but there were still a few paw prints,” he says and settles his Stetson on his knee and looks at me.

  I suffer a shrug. I think, Homage to thee, Oh Governor of the Divine House. Sepulchral meals are bestowed upon thee, and he overthroweth for thee thine enemies, setting them under thy feet in the presence of thy scribe and of the Utchat and of Ptah-Seker, who hast bound thee up.

  Why had a lonely nine-year-old boy on an isolated Illinois farm in the late 1950s chosen Anubis to worship, going so far as to learn the ancient deity’s language and ceremonies? Perhaps it was because the boy’s only friend had been Wittgenstein, his old collie, and the boy liked the jackal god’s head and ears. Who knows? Perhaps gods choose their worshipers rather than the other way around.

  The question had been whether to tell Dale that he was never at risk from the Hounds. The Guardians of the Corpse Ways, like jackals cleansing the tombs of undeserving carrion, are protectors of the liminal zone at the boundaries of the two worlds. Like phagocytes in the bloodstream of the living, they are not just psychopomps, protectors of souls duri
ng the transition voyage, but scavengers, seeking out and returning souls who have crossed that boundary in the wrong direction and who do not belong on the east bank of the living, no matter how terrible the imperative of the torment that has brought them back there. But who is to say that Dale had not been at risk? He had, after all, volunteered to travel to the west bank necropolis in attempting to kill himself, and in that sense at least, summoned Osiris to weigh his heart in the Hall of the Two Truths.

  “Professor, you all right? You seem to have gone away for a minute there.”

  “I’m all right,” I say huskily. “Tired. Side hurts.”

  McKown nods, lifts his Stetson, and stands. He turns to go and then turns back. Columbo, I think, remembering Dale’s earlier thought. Instead of asking some final, insightful, damning question, McKown gives me information. “Oh, I looked through Constable Stiles’s files for 1960–1965 and found something interesting from 1961.”

  I wait again.

  “It seems that Dr. Staffney, Michelle’s father, the surgeon, called Barney Stiles in late March of that year and demanded that C.J. Congden, his old henchman Archie Kreck, and a couple of other local thugs be arrested . . . for rape. According to Barney’s sloppy report, Dr. Staffney said that these boys—well, Congden was seventeen then, so not quite boys—these punks had taken his daughter for a ride, driven her out to the empty McBride house—Mr. McBride had moved to Chicago and the place was empty then before his sister moved in—driven her out to the empty McBride place, and raped her several times. Did you know anything about this, Professor?”

  “No,” I say truthfully.

  McKown shakes his head. “Dr. Staffney dropped the charges the next day, and as far as I know neither he nor Barney ever mentioned it again. Michelle was only in seventh grade then. My guess is that J. P. Congden, C.J.’s father, threatened the good Dr. Staffney.”